The Effect of Climate on Migration: United States, 1995-2000

Dudley Poston, Texas A&M University
David Gotcher, Abilene Christian University
Yuan Gu, Texas A&M University

In this paper we undertake an aggregate-based analysis of the effect of climate on migration. We examine this relationship among the fifty states of the United States. We focus attention on the varying effects of climate on three migration measures for the 1995-2000 time period, namely, in-migration, out-migration, and net migration. We next evaluate the effect of climate on migration in the context of a broad application of human ecology. Here climate, a manifestation of the physical environment, is entertained as a major independent variable along with other predictors pertaining to organization, population, technology, and the social environment; this permits our examination of the effects of climate on migration in the context of competing ecological hypotheses.